Moneyless Pensions Yield No Gold for the Old

For the unemployed men and women standing on sidewalks between a labor bureau office and a park every day at 6 a.m., the change of seasons is a reminder that searching for jobs will grow more desperate as cold weather nears.

Most of these streetside job-hunters in this section of Shenyang, an industrial city in Liaoning province, are more than forty years old and have been jobless for years.

They include some of the estimated 700,000 workers laid off in the late 1990s when state-owned smokestack industries downsized or closed. China was at the time eliminating the last vestiges of its planned economy, cradle-to-grave workforce support system.

In the short run, most of Tiexi’s unemployed would gladly take a temporary job or even a one-day handyman’s project. In the long run, though, they hope to benefit from the government’s ongoing effort to support retirees by improving what’s now a fragmented pension system.

For the system to work, experts say, China will have to take advantage of a demographic window of opportunity. It’s a window that’s expected to close, however, over the next few years as the population rapidly ages.

Some 13 percent of the nation’s population of 1.3 billion is at least sixty years old. That percentage is expected to jump to 30 percent by 2020, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The central government is counting on its three-year-old national social security fund, which held 772.7 billion yuan at the end of last year, to over time effectively buttress its graying citizens. Most of the fund’s money comes from direct central government injections, state-owned company stock, and capital gains from various investments.

Officials such as Yin Chengji, spokesman for Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, say the fund is financially sustainable.

At a press conference in July, Yin said overall pension contributions by workers and companies already exceed spending levels. The social security fund and the rest of the nation’s public pension accounts had a 2 trillion yuan surplus during the first half 2012, he said.

Yin did not mention, however, that private pension accounts in China are running a combined deficit of around 2.2 trillion yuan. Nor did he acknowledge the looming challenges connected to the rising tide of retirees, or the pension fund gaps separating rich parts of the country from rural areas and the northeastern rust belt.

“The gap” between funds on hand and pension obligations “cannot be resolved by the social security fund alone,” said Zuo Xuejin, deputy director for the China Academy of Social Sciences in Shanghai. “The fund is tiny compared with the potential pension system burden.”

Workers dismissed in Tiexi in the 1990s typically received buyout packages in the tens of thousands of yuan. That money is long gone, and today new jobs are hard if not impossible to find in part because by Chinese company standards most of these ex-workers are considered too old to hire.

Temporary and handyman work keeps food on the table for jobless men such as a fifty-seven-year-old surnamed Wang who stood on the street August 26 with a cardboard sign declaring his availability and skill: “Electrician,” it read.

Wang waited all morning and got no bites. “I’m too old,” he told a reporter. “Employers are not interested.”

Dual Track

Zheng Bingwen, an Academy of Sciences research fellow, is urging the government to switch to an individualistic pay-as-you-go social security system, also known as a notional defined contribution (NDC) scheme. Each worker would contribute to and tap his or her own retirement account. The social pool would be eliminated, and gaps between public and private accounts would be closed.

But Zheng and other NDC proponents face an uphill climb in the face of financial hurdles tied to previous attempts to redesign China’s pension system.

For example, an experimental project approved by the State Council in 2001 for Liaoning and twelve other communities has so far failed to reach its goal. Social pool contributions haven’t matched rising expenditures, forcing the Liaoning government to dip into private accounts to cover obligations.

Now, more than a decade later, “the situation is severe” across the province, said Zhao Wenxiang, deputy chairman of the Labor and Social Security Institution in Liaoning. “We should issue a warning card for the Liaoning program.”

Work on a national pension scheme started in 1997. Emerging from the drafting process was a system with two pillars—a pay-as-you-go social pool providing support for all retirees based on contributions from the active labor pool, and a supplementary system for private, retirement savings.

The social pool is financed by employers who contribute 20 percent of each employee’s wages. Private account funds come from employees who contribute 8 percent of his or her wages.

The system is not without critics. Some question its fairness, since government workers and government-affiliated institution staffers don’t have to pay anything out-of-pocket yet enjoy annuities higher than those for other retired urban workers.

Government retirees in Liaoning receive an average of 3,800 yuan per month, according to Feng Youwei, a former provincial congress member in Liaoning. But company retirees average 1,800 yuan monthly.

The dual-track system has run into trouble financially, too. In fact, fourteen provinces, including Liaoning and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, reported their social accounts were running in red now, forcing them to borrow from private accounts.

Exacerbating the problem is the system’s fragmented oversight. Major policies are handed down by the central government, but planning is handled at provincial and municipality levels, and actual everyday operations are carried out by cities.

Any city or other government entity that can’t cover its obligations has to beg the central government for money. Rich cities, on the other hand, enjoy surpluses but sometimes struggle to manage their pension accounts.

The Liaoning government, for example, asked Beijing for help and got it in 2009 when the central government started pumping the province’s social pool with 1.63 billion yuan a year, up from the earlier subsidy of 1.44 billion yuan.

Beijing also gave the nod for the provincial government to borrow from the private accounts, tapping up to 30 percent of the input from worker contributions.

The province has yet to spell out plans or a possible timetable for repaying private accounts.

Other provinces and municipalities followed Liaoning’s lead by tapping their own private accounts, but none dipped as deeply and instead created reserve funds that can be tapped as needed to meet costs.

Running Dry

With a strong and relatively young workforce, Liaoning—like most parts of China—has enjoyed a demographic dividend since the 1980s. But it’s disappearing quickly. And by 2017, more than 14 percent of the province’s population will be age sixty-five or older.

Even now, pension expenditures weigh on local government budgets. Shenyang’s social pool in 2010 posted a deficit of 3.1 billion yuan, equal to 6.75 percent of the city government’s budget.

Fushun, a Liaoning city once nicknamed China’s “capital of coal,” has run out of mining resources and has been stuck with an even heavier burden: More than 15 percent of the government’s budget went toward retiree payments in 2011.

“In developed countries, social spending takes usually 20 percent of a government’s budget,” said Liu Haining, a professor at the School of Economics and Management at Shenyang Aerospace University. “It’s mostly put toward education, medical care and subsidies to disadvantaged families.

“If pension spending alone comprises up to 15 percent of a government budget, as in Fushun, the burden is really too high,” Liu said.

Liaoning officials vowed to adjust the system to make the public account sustainable and repay the private account. They followed up by expanding pension coverage to generate higher contributions between 2006 and 2011 to supplement central government transfers.

But it was not enough to relieve headaches linked to Liaoning’s modern history and demographics.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, women were encouraged to bear as many children as possible. As a result some 1 million people retired in Liaoning between 2006 and 2011. But the working-age labor pool increased much less during that time.

Liaoning’s pension system is also designed to support people who retired before 1997 but never contributed to the pension system, as well as those who retired in the late 1990s after contributing relatively little.

Local governments such as those in Tiexi and Fushun were ordered to cover the pensions for people laid off during the state-owned company shutdowns in the late 1990s.

Companies affiliated with Fushun’s state-owned coal bureau, for example, burdened the city with what grew by 2011 to about 1 billion yuan in pension obligations for 360,000 ex-workers.

Experts expect these historical costs to saddle the province’s government budgets until around 2040. If not for these former state workers, though, officials say Liaoning’s social pool would have had a 55 billion yuan surplus in 2010.

Meanwhile, employees and employers who pay into the system have complained about the high costs they bear. Many companies say they’re already squeezed by rising labor costs.

A 2011 survey conducted by the Shenyang government found 41 percent of local residents think they can’t afford pension payments. And many of the estimated 300,000 people in Shenyang who stopped contributing to private accounts in 2011 were college graduates who chose to delay payments until they feel they can better afford it.

The pension rules say a worker who contributes for fifteen years continuously can receive benefits at retirement.

Wang the electrician says he finds the payments impossibly high. He earns about 500 yuan a month by taking on temporary jobs and fishing in trash cans for empty plastic bottles. The local pension plan’s minimum, out-of-pocket payment for a man like Wang is 457 yuan a year.

From the Caixin Editors

Laying off millions of northeastern factory workers was painful but economically predictable during an overhaul for China’s state-run manufacturing sector in the 1990s. Yet long-term pension needs were overlooked by government planners who abruptly ended the era of the iron rice bowl. Today, the consequences of that oversight are growing increasingly serious, as this report from Liaoning province shows. The pension crunch is a nationwide problem that’s already entrenched in the industrial northeast, which bore the brunt of the 1990s factory shutdowns. But the problem is spreading fast as the retiree population swells everywhere. Particularly vexing for policymakers are questions surrounding iron-rice-bowl pensioners who paid no social security taxes in the past but who need benefits to survive. Ultimately, it seems, someone will have to pay.

By Caixin staff reporter Lan Fang

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After months of speculation, the reorganization of the State Council has finally been approved by the National People’s Congress.Under the shake-up, China’s rail business will no longer be managed by the regulator. Three national agencies will be...

A skin cream customer pays an extra fee and, voilà, instantly becomes a company representative with the right to sell cream and other products, as well as recruit more dealers.Eventually, she persuades other women to buy the cream and join the...

Hundreds of villagers in Hebei province discovered they were victims of identity theft—and in demanding officials find the culprit, they became the recipients of harassment and legal bills. Instead of seeing a shakeout, the villagers watched...

China’s IPO action has been locked in ice since October by China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) officials intent on boosting investor confidence and improving scrutiny of stock market hopefuls.Yet the heat is on for aspiring executives at...

Finally, it seems the railways ministry may soon be restructured as part of a wider exercise by the government to streamline its ministries. Putting railway reform on the agenda of this year’s meetings of the National People’s Congress and the...

Imagine a luxury goods shopper so confident and flush with cash that one day he walks into a Shanghai handbag shop, flashes 300,000 yuan, and waltzes out with almost every bag in stock.That’s what happened last year at a Prada store where Benny Lu...

Barely any rainfall on a bone-dry landscape has always made crop farming in the province of Gansu a rough gamble between the sky and local irrigation policies. But now, farmers reap only sorrow from fields that experts say are severely contaminated...

Flames of a public relations disaster were licking at the heels of a private equity firm when China’s most notorious Internet-scrubbing company rode to the rescue.Saving the Shenzhen-based firm’s image was not cheap, and it took more than two months...

Engineers, inventors, and industrial futurists in China are setting sights on a new technological frontier as three-dimensional printing slowly revolutionizes manufacturing.A Beijing University research team, for example, has been working on what...

The cameras could be rolling soon for long-anticipated stock listings by the nation’s largest movie producer and foreign flick importer China Film Group, as well as a smaller but ambitious rival, Shanghai Film Group.The state-owned companies’ names...

A new phase of Sino-American relations is poised to begin now that Xi Jinping has been confirmed as China’s next leader and Barack Obama re-elected U.S. president.In both countries, the debate about foreign policy options has been robust,...

Wiretapping, email hacking, cell phone tracking, and secret videotaping are just a few of the cloak-and-dagger techniques long employed by police in the course of criminal investigations in China.But now, for the first time, new rules say that...

It started with a baby that was left in the doorway of a hospital bathroom. Yuan Lihai took in the girl with a cleft lip while working at a Henan province hospital in 1989. At the department of gynecology and obstetrics, she was paid 20 yuan for...

Now is the right time for China to implement its global outreach strategy.While seizing this opportunity, we should also guard against risk first, with a sense of calmness. This means adhering to business decisions and sound operations, considering...

It’s oil with an extra something, but there’s nothing virgin about it. Pumped from sewers outside restaurants and drained from dumpsters, it’s cooking oil born from waste both human and mechanical.Known in China as “gutter oil,” it’s commonly used...

The Hong Kong branch of China Development Bank (CDB) has been ordered by its Beijing headquarters to cancel loans that would have been used to finance an acquisition involving the nation’s second-largest insurer, a bank source said.The source said...

The notorious system that lets police send detainees to labor camps without trial will be halted this year, said Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission, at a conference on January 7.Meng said the Communist Party’s Central...

Legal experts have called on the government to follow through with hints at abolishing the country’s notorious system of labor camps.On January 7, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu said at a top conference that the system would “cease to be used.” His...

I’m often asked whether it’s more difficult for a Chinese company to survive now than it was in the 1980s, when I started my business. The two eras are indeed different. Many entrepreneurs with whom I shared the stage at awards ceremonies have since...

The tumor was growing, and the family of cancer patient Xia Jianqing was growing desperate.Doctors at a military hospital in Beijing had warned Xia’s family that he would die without the blood needed for a lifesaving operation. But the hospital had...

Nestled between mountains and a winding river in a scenic corner of Shanxi province is Zhongyang County, the home of an exquisite Confucian temple built during the Ming dynasty.The colorful wooden temple graced this idyllic valley for hundreds of...

The latest twist in a long-running dispute between Beijing and Washington securities regulators over Chinese audits is threatening to boot Chinese companies from America stock exchanges.The plot thickened on December 3, when the U.S. Securities and...

I was informed in late November that the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA) had invited me to a whole-day meeting in Beijing to discuss my impressions of the 18th National Party Congress and give advice to the Chinese government...

A deathbed plea brought an unexpected guest to Li Zhuang’s home one day last March, setting in motion a legal process that soon may clear the Beijing lawyer’s name, throw out a number of convictions, and close a sordid chapter of the Bo Xilai story...

Every day, about a dozen mobile phone wholesalers field orders and manufacturer offers from offices inside a nondescript, five-story building on Luthuli Avenue in downtown Nairobi.The building doesn’t look like a hub for global commerce, nor does it...

A crowd of angry investors packed a Shanghai branch of Huaxia Bank on December 3 after they heard that the money wasn’t there for the first of four repayments for a 119 million-yuan wealth management plan. They demanded their money back from Huaxia...

The country’s recent leadership transition was widely depicted as a triumph for conservative hardliners and a setback for the cause of reform—a characterization that has deepened the gloominess that pervades Western perceptions of China.In fact,...

High-profile talk emphasizing environmental action at the Communist Party’s 18th national congress attracted a lot of attention. News from the November proceedings spurred industry demands for more information and pushed stock prices higher for...

A nationwide uproar paralleled the investigation that led to the identification of five street children who suffocated in a large rubbish bin in the city of Bijie, Guizhou province.Officials learned the victims were the sons of three brothers. The...

A “tomb-flattening policy” in Henan province has sparked intense controversy, with millions of tombs reportedly destroyed by local authorities in a quest to turn graveyards into farmland.The policy can be seen as a historical extension of land-...

Calls for government officials to disclose personal and family assets are growing louder in China, mainly in reaction to the rising number of corruption cases affecting officialdom.And some officials are listening. A local Communist Party official...

Over the past twenty years, economist Zhang Zhuoyuan has witnessed and actively participated in building the nation’s economic policy.He participated in the drafting of reports at each of the Communist Party’s three previous national congresses,...

Sections of the 18th National Party Congress report that have justifiably generated the most attention are references to political reform.Anyone who did not harbor unrealistic hopes about the congress and its outcome can read the report and find...

Is China’s wealth management business a booming profit volcano for investors, or just another smoke-and-mirrors pyramid scheme?It’s a question dividing the nation’s bankers and banking regulators as investors of all kinds pour cash into bank-...

Jiang Zemin’s Lyrical MemoryCompiled by Caixin(Beijing)—A glance at off-hours correspondence between two veteran leaders has added a lighter dimension to the recent public appearances of former Politburo members in the run-up to the party’s 18th...

On the last day of Zhao Xiang’s short life, her request to donate every organ possible to save the lives of others was brushed off by the president of Shenzhen Liulian Hospital.Zhao, her parents, and transplant specialists from the Shenzhen branch...

China’s leadership handover comes at a critical moment for society and the economy, and changes are in order.The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party this month comes at a critical time described by economist Wu Jinglian as “a tipping...

The crestfallen former chairman of fast-food restaurant giant Kungfu Catering Management Co. Ltd. is awaiting a verdict after a trial on corporate embezzlement charges apparently instigated by his former business partner’s wife.If Cai Dabiao is...

Liu Futang expressed a sense of foreboding just before his recent arrest by posting a microblog entry that began, “If one day I’m invited out for tea, please don’t worry about me.”“Drink tea” is a euphemism in China for an unwanted interrogation by...

Investing like an angel now costs no more than an average duck dinner in Beijing.The force driving China’s growing ranks of small-scale angel investors are crowdfunding websites, which offer individuals access to business financing pools for as...

No matter how you look at it, the disciplinary process surrounding the case of Bo Xilai will have historic implications.Details of the crimes committed by Bo, his wife, Bogu Kailai, and his former right-hand man, Wang Lijun, reflect a level of...

The Communist Party has expelled Bo Xilai, the former party chief of Chongqing, who’s been embroiled in corruption allegations since early this year.The Politburo made the decision on September 28, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Bo will next...

Fractures had long plagued the rocky mountainside next to Huang Daihong’s home. When an earthquake jolted Luozehe County in Yunnan province, Huang watched a large black boulder release a shower of stones that instantly killed her neighbor.The...

There is growing public skepticism about the veracity of a government report detailing a demolition-related incident in Panjin, Liaoning province, during which a police officer killed a villager for allegedly threatening his life.Questions revolve...

A reality-talent TV songfest popular in more than forty countries around the world has become an instant hit in China, underpinning enthusiasm for an experimental business model linked to media sector reform.The Voice of China’s debut show in July...

On the afternoon of September 16, rows of policemen and security personnel in black T-shirts lined Beijing’s Liangmaqiao Road near the Japanese embassy during protests over the Diaoyu Islands controversy. Security guards were visible everywhere,...

Putting the right spin on one’s words is a science, and civil servants with fiduciary responsibility have to master this subject. It helps to shift blame to someone else; a child, a spouse, or a convenient foreigner will do.Several weeks ago Yang...

There won’t be a war in East Asia.The United States has five military alliances in the western Pacific. Its allies are South Korea, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore. And American battleships are busy patrolling the seas.Without a go-...

They’re still hung over from a 4 trillion yuan spending spree initiated by the central government nearly four years ago, but local governments across China are pressing ahead anyway with huge new investment plans.In late August, for example, the...

Thirty-six people died recently on a Shaanxi province highway when a double-decker bus slammed into a fuel tanker.The crash underscored ongoing demands for beefing up traffic law enforcement and improving the design of these often-crowded overnight...

Lea Cao had his first inkling that something was wrong when he got a long-distance phone call from relatives in southeastern China.His family members in Fuzhou phoned Cao in New York to say that his parents and brother had failed to arrive at the...

Mushroom gatherers converge and crawl on hillsides in Qinghai province every March while foraging for wild caterpillar fungus.Theirs is not a garden-variety morel hunt. Caterpillar fungus is a hard-to-find parasite that infects and mummifies a host...

In the financial documents for a Guangdong province grower and processor of tea seed oil is a list of key shareholders who also happen to be the relatives of local government officials.Off the record, Guangdong Xindadi Biotechnology Co. Ltd. and its...

A desert city infamously littered with new but vacant apartment buildings and idle construction sites is getting no relief in the parched climate for local government budgets.Ordos, where local leaders have been trying for years to build a thriving...

Capital flows out of China may be accelerating, a phenomenon commonly associated with waning confidence in a nation’s economy. But the foreign exchange regulator says the change is a step in the right direction.In the first six months of the year,...

Closer Look: Nearly Getting Away with MurderBy Zhang JianjingShortly after Bogu Kailai received a death sentence with a two-year reprieve, four former high-ranking Chongqing police officers were sentenced to jail terms ranging from five to eleven...

Standing up to a wave of pessimism about China’s prospects for continuing high-level economic growth is no easy task.But economist Lin Yifu, who recently retired as a senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, is holding his ground...

China’s titans of online retailing have unsheathed their marketing swords for a war in cyberspace that industry watchers say will decide the future of everyday shopping habits for nearly a billion consumers.Dozens of retail companies have staked out...

Will it be clear or gray skies today? Increasingly, the answer in China may be decided by the government.The Chinese have been seeding clouds for decades. Airplanes equipped with rocket-launchers and chemicals for inducing rainfall are based in...

Breaking into the animated film industry usually requires a basic plan for blending colorful images and clever storytelling in ways that entertain the public—and make money.Since 2006, however, animated film start-ups in China have done quite well...

Most shop owners in a city of roughly 8 million people have pulled down their shutters to avoid what they fear will be stringent enforcement of a city ordinance tied to the hosting of the 2013 National Games.Small business owners in Shenyang,...

Several authors of a “danmei” fiction website were recently detained by authorities. The injustice is so glaringly obvious that I can’t stop myself from saying something.Danmei (or “boys' love”) fiction is particularly interesting only to a...

A twenty-six-year-old woman who moved to Beijing from a distant town for work could be a poster child for urban China’s latest housing market phenomenon: skyrocketing rents.The woman, surnamed Fang, said goodbye to Liaoning province three years ago...

After Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd., a Wuxi-headquartered photovoltaic cell producer, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, China’s solar industry grew at an astonishing speed. More than 200 photovoltaic product manufacturers are...

Debt-ridden Jiangxi LDK Solar has defaulted on at least 600 million yuan in unpaid bills for raw materials and equipment, twenty suppliers say.“Starting from late last year, LDK Solar was delinquent on 15 million yuan to our company,” Liu Qingfeng,...

Ding Zhijian, a 34-year-old editor at a children’s literature publishing company, was on his way home after meeting a colleague when a horrific rainstorm hit Beijing.Earlier that day, his wife had asked Ding not to leave the house. It was the...

China’s Olympic training system demands its athletes give their all—and not expect much in return.It’s a structured, planned, and government-funded system specifically designed to churn out winners.While other countries around the world build...

China’s best athletes have not only broken records but they’ve hauled in increasingly sizeable cash bonuses from central and local governments for their champion, medal-winning performances at Olympic events.Between 1984, when China re-entered the...

Wine-tasting party conversations among investors in China are increasingly sounding like sour grapes.Some well-heeled wine investors have been anxiously debating whether a price bubble for investment-grade wine is getting ready to burst. Others...

The Chinese economy’s rapid growth over the past thirty years has fundamentally changed global economic structures. But our achievements have come at a price: We have run up against hard limits in many areas, including factor investment costs and...

The professional dreams of a team of locomotive designers and rail systems engineers sped along steel tracks through the countryside of northeastern China.The year was 2003, and high-speed track testing was under way between the cities of Shenyang...

Labor leader Wayne Swan has his finger on the pulse of the Australian economy as the nation’s deputy prime minister and treasurer, which means he’s well-equipped to explain factors defining the increasingly robust relationship between China and...

The last lakes in Hubei province are shrinking so fast that no one knows whether new government regulations—the latest leg of a sixteen-year-old environmental scramble—can reverse the disappearing act.The province has been losing its once-bountiful...

Has the division of spoils from China’s rapid economic growth become a one-sided affair? The answer is less abstract when one considers the state of the nation’s environment.Waterways are barricaded by garbage, mountains gouged with dusty pits, and...

Slowing nationwide power demand and coal consumption, twin barometers for economic growth, suggest the Chinese economy may be sailing into the doldrums while at the same time changing its course.Electricity use in May rose a relatively mild 5.2...

The dark clouds over bankrupt Swedish car maker Saab have finally cleared.Saab Automobile AB’s liquidator signed an agreement in mid-June with National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB (NEVS) to sell the company’s main assets to the Sino-Japanese...

A calm, confident Robert Diamond discussed financial restructuring in Europe and economic options for the Chinese government during a June 14 interview—thirteen days before the British bank where he serves as CEO, Barclays Group, was fined for...

The shale gas revolution in the United States has led to a debate in China over shale gas development. But can the United States really achieve energy self-sufficiency? And if it can, what are the implications for China?Ever since the Nixon era,...

Xiaomi Mobile Internet Co. has raised US$216 million, its CEO says, raising the total value of the upstart, homegrown Chinese smartphone maker to US$4 billion.If Lei Jun’s claim is accurate, his two-year-old company’s value is close to the market...

Increasing government spending would be a disservice to society rather than a benefit if Beijing wants to create a consumption-led economy, one economist says in a recent research report.“The so-called ‘structural optimization,’ which refers to...

There’s no denying that the gastronomic horizons of Chinese cuisines sometimes verge on the infinite. But on factors of food quality, there’s little subtlety or nuance for safety standards.In the past five years, the number of public food and drug...

On the Beijing campus of the China University of Political Science and Law stands a dramatic monument inscribed with the words of legal expert and former university president Jiang Ping: “Rule of Law for Everyone.”Jiang’s words carry special weight...

Whether measured in terms of gross domestic product, tax contributions or job creation, statistics prove that the private economy plays a crucial role in China.In some well-developed parts of the country the private sector, when factoring in...

{vertical_photo_right}A Shaanxi Province woman provoked an uproar with an online posting of a photo showing her with her seven-month-old fetus after what she said was a forced abortion.The gruesome photo was reposted across the Internet in China,...

Buying media silence is a common first step toward an initial public offering in China that siphons billions of yuan every year from companies seeking investors in Shanghai and Shenzhen.The phenomenon has been documented by the China Securities...

On May 9, China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s (CNOOC) first deepwater drilling platform began operating in the South China Sea. The world-class vessel is stationed in the Liwan 6-1-1 field, about 320 kilometers southeast of Hong Kong, in waters...

After a three-year wait, China Railway Construction Corp. Ltd. (CRCC) recently won permission to launch a major copper mining project in Ecuador.The production agreement signed April 25 by Ecuador’s government and Corriente Resources, a Canadian...

Imagine discovering on your first day as a new CEO that your employer is merely a shell that may be destined for a shameful delisting on the Nasdaq Stock Market.That’s what happened recently to ChinaCast Education Corp. CEO Feng Yiyi, who is now...

On March 17, the Chenzhou Public Security Bureau announced Huang Bailian had been removed as head of the police department’s drug squad.Huang offered a simple explanation for his sacking: “This is retaliation.”Three years earlier Huang, who is forty...

New models bearing the Chinese-owned Volvo badge shared a luxury spotlight at the Beijing International Auto Show in April with perennial stars Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Lexus.But behind the diamond-studded presentation was confusion over the legal...

Walls inside Zhang Haomin’s home in Zhenxi Township, in Chongqing, started cracking in 2008, around the time the reservoir behind the new Three Gorges Dam neared capacity.“Early on, the cracks were small,” said Zhang, whose home is about three...

China is facing a demographic reckoning that is approaching a nightmare.For thirty years, the government has been obsessed with keeping population growth down, often resorting to late-term abortions and other brutal measures. The panic now is that...

A glass of Feitian Moutai packs a wallop, which is one reason why the 106-proof baijiu is a hit among influential government officials.They also like Feitian Moutai because a single bottle, thanks to special arrangements between state agencies and...

Investors who closely followed the stock picks of one of China’s most successful brokers are wandering in the wilderness—and wondering what will happen next to their unemployed luminary Wang Yawei.In April, and without warning, Wang resigned from...

Water flowing from the Xiang River into the faucets of Hunan Province homes has been dangerous for decades. The central government first classified the river’s water as toxic in the 1980s. But the river was being called the most polluted in China as...

When NBA journeyman Damon Jones signed a shoe deal with sporting goods maker Li Ning in 2006, he became the first in a long line of American basketball players to win a sponsorship from a Chinese company.Today, China’s Peak Sport Products leads...

On a balmy, moonlit evening in the autumn of 2010, I took my son out to Yuanmingyuan to wander among the ruins. The 150th anniversary of the destruction of “The Garden of Perfect Brightness”—often called the Old Summer Palace—was approaching and I...

The Flowers of War begins December 13, 1937, with young convent girls fleeing for their lives through a besieged Nanjing shrouded in mist. The first words heard are those of the lead girl Shujuan: “Everybody was running that day but no one could...

London is forging ahead with plans for yuan-based financial services by developing an infrastructure and banking services that match its ambitions for the Chinese currency.On April 18, the city welcomed the first yuan-denominated bond issuance...

(Beijing)—Fishermen along the banks of the mighty {vertical_image_right} Yangtze River have long spoken of emptier nets and longer waits for a catch.On April 2, an unusual auction held in a downstream city in Jiangsu Province added weight to their...

(Beijing)—In much of the world, admiration and envy are common reactions to China’s consistently high GDP growth rates. But closer to home, the Chinese public’s admiration of their own economic miracle is shadowed by tax increases that consistently...

{vertical_photo_right}(Beijing)—Although sacked once for the coverup of the 2003 SARS epidemic and a second time for blocking media coverage of the 2008 Shanxi mudslides, Meng Xuenong’s career has always bounced back.According to the website of the...

(Dalian)—The sudden disappearance of a self-made billionaire in the coastal city of Dalian has unnerved not only bank executives concerned about loans they made to his companies, but also government officials who have lent generous support to the...

China is facing a crisis over providing for the elderly as its population ages and the supply of labor diminishes.The Beijing News reported in late March that state-run homes for the elderly in the capital are overcrowded. One had 7,000 applicants...

Roughly 1 million Chinese nationals are working or doing business in Africa, from Egypt’s Mediterranean shore to the Cape of Good Hope.Theirs are the faces behind China’s soaring direct investment in Africa, which, according to the Ministry of...

The development of China's private economy requires financial support, especially private financial support. Wenzhou is the home of the private economy. With 99.5 percent of companies falling into the category of small and micro enterprises,...

At a time when China was bursting with an urge to cover buildings in shimmering silver and gray, Wang Shu, the first Chinese winner of the Pritzker Prize, was an architect who felt that changing tastes didn’t have to mean changing one’s sense of...

A typically opaque investigation can begin with a tip from a Shanghai Stock Exchange official and end with a ten-year jail term for a businessman convicted of insider trading. What happens in between is a carefully guarded secret.Likewise hidden...

For months, thousands of villagers in Wukan, Guangdong Province, staged large protests over illegal land seizures, rigged elections and official corruption. The unrest started in September, and as the months wore on they attracted nationwide, then...

Work on China’s nuclear power plants started picking up again about a year after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. But the meltdown in March 2011 was still fresh on the minds of four retired cadres in Anhui Province’s Wangjiang County.They filed a...

When I was a child, my family had an old-fashioned phonograph that had been passed down from my grandfather. It required hand-winding and used a bamboo needle, and it came with special silver tweezers for cutting the bamboo needles.On the side of...

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